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Carrying the fire home: performing nation, identity, indigenous diaspora and home in the poems, songs, and performances of Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo and Gayle Ross

CARRYING THE FIRE HOME:
PERFORMING NATION, IDENTITY, INDIGENOUS DIASPORA AND HOME IN THE POEMS, SONGS, AND PERFORMANCES OF ARIGON STARR, JOY HARJO AND GAYLE ROSS
by
Carolyn Marie Dunn
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2010
Copyright 2010 Carolyn Marie Dunn

This project addresses the cultural work of nation building (political, spiritual, social) performed by narrative practices in diasporic Cherokee and Muskogee Creek communities. The overarching question of the project is: how has the concept of “home” in American Indian writing (“home” meaning a physical geography, a narrative history, and a social identity) been reconceptualized by artists in the face of widespread diasporization? I am interested in how work by Cherokee and Creek women writers, specifically Joy Harjo, Arigon Starr, and Gayle Ross, has recreated the concept of “home” as a decolonizing project of nation building within the Cherokee and Creek diasporas. The interdisciplinary fields of performance studies, literary history, American Indian Studies, gender studies, and landscape studies guide this project and its examination of poetry, storytelling, fiction, plays, and performance of the writers/artists.; I am interested in how these writers utilize indigenous epistemologies and bicultural competence in their work, and how they reinvent, re-imagine, and reconceptualize the concepts of “home” apart from the physical landscape but within the body as well. I suggest that these writers—Harjo’s How We Became Human, Ross’ How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Stories, and Starr’s The Red Road—write against the romanticized trope of “American Indian identity” and call into question stories and performance of identity that not only rewrites non-Indian invented histories but is at the same time, self-critical. Historical writers, such as Alexander Posey, John Ross and John Rollin Ridge each contribute to national narrative in historical moments of crisis in Creek and Cherokee history - Removal and the Trail of Tears; Oklahoma statehood and the destruction of tribal governments.; How do Posey, Ridge and Ross’ literal and literary descendants address these same issues under the rubric of nationalism? How does each contemporary writer define herself by her identity categories: woman, native, tribal, Creek, Cherokee, citizen, writer, actor, musician, storyteller? How do all of these identities form a decolonizing project for each writer? How are these writers writing against stereotypes of American Indians that have been and still are perpetuated by media images of “the” Native American? How are these writers influenced by the American Indian societies in which they live, work, and write? How do these writers reconcile political citizenship and cultural citizenship within their respective nations? How has their writing/performance/cultural critique addressed nation building in crucial periods of American Indian history: during; and in the era of pan-Indian tribalism and the survival of native nations and how these nations re-imagine themselves in the 21st century? What are the larger political and cultural issues: sovereignty, land struggles, gaming, gender issues, native wellness, language survival, ceremony, dance, that the writers are addressing in their work?

CARRYING THE FIRE HOME:
PERFORMING NATION, IDENTITY, INDIGENOUS DIASPORA AND HOME IN THE POEMS, SONGS, AND PERFORMANCES OF ARIGON STARR, JOY HARJO AND GAYLE ROSS
by
Carolyn Marie Dunn
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2010
Copyright 2010 Carolyn Marie Dunn